Abstract
Over the past three decades, coral populations have declined across the tropical and subtropical oceans because of thermal stress, coral diseases, and pollution. Restoration programs are currently attempting to re-establish depauperate coral populations along the Florida reef tract. We took an integrated Bayesian approach to determine which Florida reefs ranked highest based on the survival of outplanted colonies ofAcropora cervicornisfrom 2012 to 2018. Survival ofA. cervicornisoutplants was highly variable in the upper Florida Keys with some reefs showing the highest likelihood of survival (e.g., North Dry Rocks, Carysfort, Key Largo Dry Rocks, and Conch Reef), whereas some adjacent reefs showed the lowest likelihood of survival (e.g., an Unnamed Reef, Pickles Reef, and U47 Patch Reef). Similarly, survival was highly variable in the middle and lower Florida Keys and in the Broward-Miami subregions. Survival was high and less variable in Biscayne Bay and low and less variable in the Marquesas subregions. The reefs that ranked lowest for outplant survival were exposed to high wave energy. Partitioning out the spatial effects of reefs and subregions from the model, we detected spatial latent effects of low survival that were most evident in the middle and the upper Florida Keys, particularly between 2015 and 2017. The overall high spatial and temporal variability in survival among adjacent reefs highlights a need to outplant nursery-reared colonies strategically, in order to optimize coral-population recovery efforts in Florida.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Global Change and the Future Ocean, a section of the journal Frontiers in Marine ScienceReceived: 26 February 2021 Accepted: 15 June 2021 Published: 07 July 2021Citation: Banister RB and van Woesik R (2021) Ranking 67 Florida Reefs for Survival of Acropora cervicornis Outplants
Survival of Acropora cervicornis outplants was highly variable in the upper Florida Keys with some reefs showing high survival (e.g., North Dry Rocks, Carysfort, Key Largo Dry Rocks, and Conch Reef), whereas some adjacent or nearby reefs showed low survival (Figure 2)
This study showed considerable variability in A. cervicornis outplant survival across the Florida reef tract from 2012 to 2018
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Global Change and the Future Ocean, a section of the journal Frontiers in Marine ScienceReceived: 26 February 2021 Accepted: 15 June 2021 Published: 07 July 2021. Acropora cervicornis and Acropora palmata, which previously dominated the Caribbean, and were major reef builders through millennia (Agassiz, 1885; Vaughan, 1919; Goldberg, 1973; Marszalek et al, 1977; Precht and Miller, 2007), have experienced some of the largest declines. Diseases and thermal anomalies have been the main causes of coral population declines in the Caribbean (Porter and Meier, 1992; Aronson and Precht, 2001; Toth et al, 2014; Precht et al, 2016; Walton et al, 2018). A major outbreak of white-band disease in the 1970s caused a 95% decline in Caribbean acroporids (Aronson and Precht, 2001; Miller et al, 2002; Gardner et al, 2003). Coral restoration efforts are attempting to restore acroporid populations along the Florida reef tract
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